Rubens Barrichello has said he is going all out to win his home Brazilian Grand Prix as he strives to beat Jenson Button to the title.
Brazilian hoping to make a statement of intent at home race
Rubens Barrichello has said he is going all out to win his home Brazilian Grand Prix as he strives to beat Jenson Button to the world championship.
The Brawn GP driver gained a point on his championship-leading team-mate in Sunday's Japanese Grand Prix and now stands 14 points behind Button with two races remaining.
The first of those comes in Barrichello's home city of Sao Paulo next weekend and with Button needing to score four more points than his team-mate at Interlagos to take the title, the 37-year-old wants to make a real statement rather than simply play a percentage game.
"I've got to go there and win the race, that's the aim, the rest for me is just the rest," Barrichello said.
"If I deserve to win the championship, I will. I'm not going to be in the middle of the race thinking about if five plus five is 10. I mean five plus five here in Japan was six! I had a five-place penalty here in Japan and all of a sudden I was in sixth place.
"I have no intention whatsoever of looking at points or this and that. My intention is there to live in full the race in Brazil and win the race.
"I'm not there calculating what I can do, I'm going there to win the race and see later what happens. The chances of the title are smaller but not as small as when it was a 26-point gap at one point, so they're very much alive."
Tried everything
Barrichello could have made more inroads into Button's lead at Suzuka given the revised grid announced on Sunday morning following a chaotic qualifying session which saw a number of penalties awarded.
Both Brawn drivers were docked five places for not slowing under waved yellow flags and Barrichello and Button respectively found themselves sixth and 10th once the grid had been worked out.
However, poor balance and tyre trouble spoiled Barrichello's race after he pressured eventual fourth-place finisher Kimi Raikkonen's Ferrari in the early stages.
"I tried everything I could to overtake at the start but the track is just too narrow so you go into defensive mode. If you try too hard, somebody might have a go at you," he added.
"The first few laps I thought we had good pace, Raikkonen didn't have good pace and we lost time but then all of a sudden, everyone started to push and my car didn't improve a lot on the same tyres as Kimi. I was doing okay but as soon as I put on the other tyres, he disappeared.
"We had a different strategy which eventually didn't work fantastically well because other people were doing better on other tyres so that's the story of my race, fighting hard.
"The set-up wasn't brilliant. I wasn't happy with the set-up of the car but I took a point from Jenson, so that's positive."